The Saboteur™ in Review – like James Bond in the 1940s

One of the most romantic professions imaginable is the saboteur. Few people realise that aside from the CIA and its analogues around the world, spies are often ordinary citizens who take on extraordinary roles to protect their countries. They often have to act as saboteurs to help the advancement of the army and spread disarray to the enemy. And now, thanks to Hands-On Mobile, you can finally find out how it would feel to be The Saboteur™.

The Saboteur is quite an original Action/Arcade game set in Nazi-occupied France. Sean Devlin lost everything to the Third Reich and is now out for revenge. The year is 1940 and it’s going to be a hot one! Mission after mission you’ll have to seek out secrets, escape certain death and, of course, kill lots and lots of Nazis.

Without any preparation The Saboteur immediately plunges you in the heat of action. The missions can be basically split into 3 categories: reaching the exit point, gathering intel, and placing bombs, or escaping from the map with everything exploding around you. And to make things a bit more complicated, the Nazis have standing orders to shoot on sight and ask questions later. To despatch them you have a limited variety of weapons.

A nice touch in The Saboteur™ is the possibility to adapt the gameplay to your liking. For the shoot first addict – you can go ahead and start blasting everyone on sight, forcing all of the surrounding enemies to converge on your location for a real bloodbath. Or you can go the cloak and dagger route and try to keep out of sight and silently dispatch the Nazis with your trusty knife.

To the latter style of gameplay the interface of the game plays an even more crucial role than usual. Unfortunately, not all is well in this respect. The game offers the standard D-Pad plus attack button scheme. Unfortunately the D-Pad has serious responsiveness issues, often making you stumble into walls at the most crucial moment and leading to certain death. To make things worse, the visible area often doesn’t give you enough advance warning that Nazi units are in the vicinity making you easily fall into their line of sight with nothing to be done to avoid this than replay the whole level over and over again. And finally, the game automatically equips the picked up weapon! Auto-switching from the knife to the machine gun has made me blow my cover numerous times.

The graphics in Saboteur are also far from making you gasp in admiration. The game is drawn in a strict and rather bleak style, with nothing there to really catch ones eye. The developers obviously strived to convey the dark atmosphere of the game, but succeeded only to make it look uninteresting. The perspective is isometric/top-down without much to look at.

The Saboteur™ takes an excellent and original idea and drowns it in poor controls, interface and boring gameplay. My only hope now is that someone else will note the great underlying idea and make a quality product out of it. Nevertheless The Saboteur™ is definitely something worth a look come a $0.99 sale that can take a few hours of your time.